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Academy’s Troubles Shadow Key Report

When a much-anticipated report defending the beleaguered liberal arts is released on Capitol Hill next week, it will come amid bad news beyond the usual lamentations about declining enrollments, slashed budgets and the perceived unemployability of English majors.

The report, requested with much fanfare in 2010 by a bipartisan group in Congress and produced by a blue-ribbon commission assembled by the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is likely to land as controversy continues to surround Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, the academy’s embattled president and one of the report’s prime movers.

Last week Ms. Berlowitz stepped away from her day-to-day responsibilities at the academy, the 233-year-old scholarly society in Cambridge, Mass., during an independent inquiry into charges that she had falsely claimed, on grant applications and other documents, to hold a doctoral degree.

The charges were first reported in The Boston Globe, which also raised questions about Ms. Berlowitz’s compensation and management style. The academy has attributed the claims about the degree to clerical errors. Ms. Berlowitz has so far declined to comment on the matter.

Ms. Berlowitz, who remains president of the academy and a member of the commission, will not attend the June 19 release of the report in Washington, which will include speeches by its two co-chairmen and the screening of a film featuring commission members like Ken Burns, George Lucas, John Lithgow and Yo-Yo Ma, along with scholars.

Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University and a co-chairman of the commission, declined to comment on the report or on Ms. Berlowitz. But John W. Rowe, former chairman of the energy corporation Exelon, the other co-chairman, praised her hard work on Tuesday while expressing hopes that the unfolding inquiry would not diminish the commission’s two years of work.

“Leslie did a lot of wonderful work on the report,” he said, “but the commission met many times, the recommendations are ours, and the quality and caliber of the members of the commission speaks for itself.”

Such remarks may not quell unease among the academy’s roughly 4,000 members, who have been buzzing about the news since it broke last week, even if few are willing to say more than a few words on the record about Ms. Berlowitz or the turmoil in Cambridge.

“I have certainly heard from other members,” said Jesse H. Choper, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a member of the academy’s council. “They were concerned. I can’t say more.”

Photo

Leslie Cohen Berlowitz.Credit
Kurt Hegre

The report itself, billed as the first comprehensive national assessment since the 1980 report of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities, is being closely guarded in advance of its release. It was requested in 2010 by Senators Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee; and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia; and Representatives David Price, Democrat of North Carolina, and Tom Petri, Republican of Wisconsin, with the mandate to suggest the top 10 steps needed to shore up the humanities, which were described as “at risk.”

The hope is “to change the conversation and insert and assert the importance of the humanities and social sciences,” said Pauline Yu, the president of the American Council of Learned Societies and a member of the 54-person commission.

It arrives at a moment when others are sounding the alarm. In a report issued last week, Harvard University said that humanities majors there had fallen to 20 percent in 2012 from 36 percent in 1954 — a grim figure until you consider that, nationwide, just 7 percent of bachelor’s degrees were awarded in the humanities in 2010, down from 14 percent in 1966.

The academy’s report also aims to look beyond universities to the broader culture, some members of the commission said.

“There’s a world of people who never do academic humanities again after college, but who remember what they did and carry it with them and believe in it and support it,” said Anthony Grafton, a historian at Princeton University. “The Harvard numbers were scary, but the world is much more complicated than ‘poor little humanities.’ ”

As for the controversy surrounding Ms. Berlowitz, Mr. Grafton praised her as “the life and soul of the project,” but declined to comment further.

“We’re hoping it’s going to get judged on its own merits,” he said of the report.

Privately, several people connected with the academy have questioned if unflattering attention to Ms. Berlowitz’s pay might prove awkward, given that the report is, as Mr. Rowe put it, “a full-throated plea for more public and private funding.”

According to filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Ms. Berlowitz received compensation totaling more than $598,000 for the fiscal year ending in March 2012 for leading the academy’s staff of several dozen — far more than the leaders of most similar scholarly societies, and more than many college presidents.

But others suggested that worry about Ms. Berlowitz’s salary in the context of the report may be misplaced. Anthony K. Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton and a member of the commission, said he had no knowledge of Ms. Berlowitz’s salary before the recent news reports, and called it “a very good salary for a humanist.”

To focus on the salary issue, he said, is itself a sign of a deeper attitude that the humanities “are an expensive luxury,” he said, adding, “I think that’s just wrong.”

Correction: June 11, 2013

An earlier version of a summary for this article misidentified the source of the report. It was produced by a blue-ribbon commission, not the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Correction: June 18, 2013

An article on Wednesday about a report on the national arts by a commission assembled by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose president, Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, has been accused of falsely claiming to hold a doctoral degree, misidentified Ms. Berlowitz’s position on the commission. She is a member, not co-chairwoman. The article thus misstated the number of leaders of the commission. There are two — Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, and John W. Rowe, former chairman of the energy corporation Exelon, are co-chairmen — not three.

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Academy’s Troubles Shadow Key Report. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe